TBTF for 1998-03-23
[1] picked up a thread of worry in the Linux and
Open Source worlds: that their drive into the mainstream of
computing could be stalled if the entrenched players, especially
Intel, withhold critical programming information from these
communities. In a recent talk
[2] to a Chicago-area Linux users' group,
Donnie Barnes, a principal developer at Red Hat, allayed some of
these fears. Barnes let slip that Red Hat had been contacted by
Intel to consult on issues with running Linux on the new Merced
chips, when such chips become available. He also mentioned that
Intel seems willing to provide information about I2O programming
to the Red Hat folks -- this proprietary bus has been a source of
concern in the Linux community.

Barnes didn't say, and wouldn't be expected to know, whether Intel
was talking to other Linux venders. My bet is that they are.

Thanks to Michael Callahan <mjc at rodagroup dot com> for notes from this
meeting.

On 4/27 the British Department of Trade and Industry released its
much-delayed encryption policy proposal. As reported in TBTF for
1998-03-03
[3], the government wants to leave a backdoor for law
enforcement to subjects' communications, and will introduce
legislation "to enable law-enforcement agencies to obtain a warrant for
lawful access to information necessary to decrypt the content of
communications or stored data"
[4]. The government proposal also
suggests making electronic signatures legally binding and
introduces a voluntary scheme for licensing companies that provide
encryption services, rather than a mandatory one. This proposal
represents an about-face from Labor's pre-election manifesto,
which read in part:

Attempts to control the use of encryption technology are wrong
in principle, unworkable in practice, and damaging to the long-
term economic value of the information networks.

The day after the DTI report's release, Phil Zimmermann happened to
be speaking at the Infosecurity '98 show in London, and took the
opportunity to slam the government proposal
[5]. He pointed out that
a system could be imposed where a certification authority would not
sign for a signature key unless users handed over their encryption
keys. The initial PGP implementation guarded against this.
Zimmermann warned, "Don't go for this."

You can keep up-to-the-minute on developments in British crypto
policy at this page
[6] on the site of the Campaign Against Censorship
of the Internet in Britain.

A Federal judge has dismissed Wang's patent claims against Netscape
[7]. The ruling stated that Wang's patent on the early-1980s
"Videotex" system was "generically and fundamentally different" from
Internet Web browsers and related technologies. Netscape's Mozilla page
[8] thanks the hundreds of developers who responded to the company's
plea for help with the prior art:

You guys blew away our lawyers. Tons of stuff came in, and
good stuff.

You weren't waiting for a $30 refund from when you registered a
domain name
[9], were you? Now Congress has retroactively authorized
the collection of the fee
[10],
[11] as part of Internet domain-name
registration. The President has signed the measure. The lawyer who
represented the companies filing suit against domain-name registrar
Network Solutions, Inc., is not ready to let the matter rest. "We
are going to very, very vigorously oppose any suggestion that that
vague language surreptitiously entered into the bill ratified an
unconstitutional tax," he said.

Phil Agre's Red Rock Eater News Service carried an extended
discussion
[12] of the legalities of "lawful access" searches vs.
court-issued warrants, covered in TBTF for 1998-04-27
[13]. It details
the shades of grey that executive practice has patinated over the
Fourth Amendment down the years. Here is the CDT's Jim Dempsey
clarifying the role of Executive Order 12333 in the present day:

...section 2.5 of E.O. 12333 was superseded by legislation,
adopted, I think, in 1994. 50 USC 1821 - 1829. Now the
Attorney General can authorize physical searches on her own
only of premises, property or material "used exclusively by,
or under the open and exclusive control of, a foreign power."
Searches directed at agents of foreign powers must be approved
by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. My boss at
the time, Cong. Don Edwards was one of the few who objected,
arguing, that these "black bag jobs" should be abolished
altogether, not given to the FISA court.

A leaked report
[14] claims that after purchasing the Hotmail free
email service, which has 10 million subscribers, Microsoft tried and
failed to move it off of Solaris hosts and onto Windows NT. A source
is quoted as saying, "NT couldn't handle it. The issue is being
escalated." The Web server in use on Solaris is Apache 1.2.1, which
does not run on NT due to technical and other difficulties
encountered by the Apache team. This report first appeared in Network News
(1998-04-22), but I could find no online source for it.

Note added 1998-04-12:
William Wisner <wisner at gratuitous dot com> sent this clarification:

Version 1.2.1 does not run on Windows NT but the most recent
development release (1.3b6) does. Your text as written could easily be read
to mean that Apache won't run under Windows NT, period.

Microsoft's Internet Gaming Zone
[15] opened its gates to Netscape
users yesterday, rolling out a new version of its software that will
support the Netscape Navigator Web browser. This is the site that
originally inspired the TBTF Exclusionary Sites Hall of Shame
[16].

A professor who mentions Microsoft programming tools in a scholarly
presentation, or even just uses the tools, can get a check for $200
from Microsoft. The company extends this offer on the Web page of
the Academic Cooperative
[17], a Microsoft "speakers' bureau" for
computer-science professors. Ethics watchdogs call the program a
baldfaced attempt to turn professors into advertisers. Microsoft
says it's a well-intentioned effort to help faculty members cover
their conference costs, and notes that $200 is not that big a deal,
anyway. But it's a bigger deal for a professor in a public
institution than for a stock-optioned Microsoft employee. "We're so
strapped, we don't look a gift horse in the mouth," says a CS
professor at U.Mass-Lowell.

The California bill, covered in TBTF for 1997-04-20
[18], died last week
in the Assembly's Judiciary Committee. Supporters plan to
reintroduce the legislation
[19]. The idea is spreading: other states and
the Congress are considering similar laws
[20].

We expect the millenium bug to have financial and legal impacts. Now
the Netly News
[21] has uncovered the first evidence of its likely
political fallout. Republican strategists are maneuvering to pin the
Y2K problem on the Vice President, who has cast himself as both the
champion of high tech and the prime mover in the Reinventing
Government initiative. So why hasn't he been leading the effort to
stomp this bug in government and industry?

Risks 19.71 (1998-05-01)
[22] introduces a subject we will be hearing
more about as testing for Year 2000 fixes accelerates: problems
caused by systems that can't handle date records jumping around.
The scenario: testers set the system date ahead to late 1999. After
testing they set it back but forget to purge the log and transaction
data that is stamped with out-of-sequence dates. The anonymous Risks
correspondent notes that such problems are easy to fix but that
there may be a lot of them.

Wine broker Bordeaux Index has spent a fortune making sure
its computers can handle the Millennium bug. Yesterday it
had no trouble shifting a magnum of Chateau Margaux 1900 for
9,000 pounds -- but trying to log the sale proved more
difficult. No matter how hard they tried, the computer kept
changing the description to Ch. Margaux 2000. "We are stumped,"
says a spokesman. "We can't get it to register the proper
name."

Visit
[24] for a quotidian load of press clippings on Y2K. For a
wider view -- a robot that watches (currently) fifteen Y2K summary
pages and reports differences day by day -- see Ingenious
Technologies' Daily Diffs
[25].

This site
[26], one of the few rigorous academic research projects
on Web searching, presents a demonstration database -- only 25M
documents -- that already blows past most of the existing search
engines in returning relevant nuggets. Google employs a concept of
Page Rank derived from academic citation literature. Page Rank
equates roughly to a page's importance on the Web: the more inbound
links a page has, and the higher the importance of the pages linking
to it, the higher its Page Rank. The project used to be called
BackRub and its spiders are still so called; those of you hosting
Web pages will have seen its tracks of late in your log files. I
tried a search for "Schmanthrax" -- the title of TBTF for 1998-02-23
[27] -- and of the 16 items returned, the top one was that very
issue and 10 were linking pages on the TBTF archive. Alta Vista and
HotBot returned a far larger number of hits, predominantly the
mailing list archives of TBTF republishers.

The site has this to say about the name:

We chose our system name, Google, because it is a common
spelling of googol, or 10^100 and fits well with our goal
of building very large-scale search engines.

This TechWeb story
[28], covering a NetWorld+Interop talk by a Uunet
executive, slips in an appealing piece of jargon, which the Jargon
Scout
[29] is more than happy to pick up. We are to believe that
this is how ISPs refer to the data bursts on which business-to-business
Internet commerce is built.

The biggest challenge to ISPs such as Uunet is presented by
silicon cockroaches, or computer-to-computer communications
that cause short bursts of huge amounts of data traffic in
highly unpredictable patterns.

The bestselling book on ActiveX in the Boston software community --
in fact the bestselling software book in any category -- is Mr.
Bunny's Guide to ActiveX[30]. The book is a joke from cover to
cover, perpetrated by Gary Swanberg
writing as Carleton Egremont III. Last February object expert Charlie
Kindel mentioned the book favorably on a DCOM developers' mailing
list and launched an underground publishing phenomenon. As far as
I know, Softpro Books is the exclusive distributor of Mr. Bunny's
Guide. Amazon professes total ignorance of its ISBN. You can buy
the book here
[31], and since Softpro has no "associates" program
I won't even get a kickback, but hey, don't let that stop you.
It's only $13.95 and cheap at half the price.

No, we're not the exclusive sellers. You can get it at
Computer Literacy, we wholesale to them. I think that Quantum
carried it, though whether or not they still are stocking it I
don't know. B&N and Borders have bought from us for
resale. And I think that Wordworth is carrying it. Whether or
not we're the only ones with it on our web site is a question.

This year when People magazine began hyping its annual Most
Beautiful People poll, some People person had the bright idea to open
up voting on the Web. Bad idea. Usenet fans of radio schlock-jock
Howard Stern began encouraging Netizens to write in votes for a
regular character on the show: Hank the Angry, Drunken Dwarf. The
campaign spread across the Net and surely lots of people who had
never heard, perhaps never heard of, Howard Stern voted for the
Dwarf. (Yours truly did.) The magazine suspended Web voting after
Hank pulled ahead of Leonardo DiCaprio. The Net, its fun spoilt,
howled in protest; the magazine relented and reinstated the
voting page, even adding Hank's name to a preconfigured button to
save visitors the trouble of a write-in. Voting closed on 5/8 and
the last time I looked before that, Hank was outgunning Lenny the
Cap by twenty to one. The final tally
[32] should be announced on
Monday 5/11. Here is the page that, so it claims, started the
write-in campaign
[33]. The vote for Hank took off seriously after
Stern allowed a caller to cite this URL on his broadcast. This
story was picked up by some media outlets more traditional than
the one you are reading
[34].

I've long been a fan of pronouncing "www" as triple-dub, a
neologism proposed in one of Wired's first Jargon Watch columns.
Several other suggestions for verbalizing URLs appeared recently on
the newsgroup alt.religion.kibology, whose chaos is presided over
by James "Kibo" Parry <kibo at world dot std dot com>. The newsgroup sprang
up in the days before the Web out of the conviction that Kibo must
be God. Parry had set up filters on a full Usenet newsfeed and was
known for sending email, posthaste, to anyone who used the word
"Kibo" in any Usenet posting. Kibo's posting is an object lesson
in quoting a discussion thread and running it off a cliff. See why
they think he's God?

>>:>I want to invent a time machine just so I can kill the guy
>>:>who named the letter W and have its named changed to "wee."
>>:You know, I've always been meaning to introduce "wee wee wee"
>>:as a pronunciation of "www", but I've had such little occa-
>>:sion to pronounce an URL aloud.
>>I've gotten a couple of other DJs at the radio station to an-
>>nounce our URL as "hut-up wow", but I haven't heard anyone
>>else say it that way yet.
>My preferred pronounciation is "Hat Tip, Woo Woo" but I can't
>get anyone to use it. Maybe if I actually paid them to do it.
But this skirts the real issue: what's the name of "://"?
I like to call it "lizard lips" because we all know that
sideways lizard faces have diagonal lips. Nowadays most
smileys are too kissable.
:-X

Notice, in the second quoted passage, that the writer appears to
believe that "URL" is pronounced "earl." Must be a newbie. Coming
to you live from hat-top, lizard-lips, triple-dub, tee-bee-tee-eff dot com,
I remain, yrs. sincerely, &tc.

Notes

Flash Crowd is a short story by Larry Niven, collected in The Flight
of the Horse
[35],
now out of print. The story imagines a near-future
time when a system of cheap teleportation in use around the world
enables instant mobs to gather at newsworthy events. How like the
Web.